More than 80 years ago, Caroline Mytinger, a portrait artist, and her childhood friend Margaret Warner set out by freighter from San Francisco with little more than $400 in their pocket and a tin of paints to their name. Their objective was to paint portraits of the tribal people of Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands before the encroachment of modern, European-style culture changed their lives forever. This gripping book tells of the two women’s experiences whilst travelling through Melanesia between 1926 and 1930.

This title was first published in 2000: An original and thought-provoking analysis of modern initiatives in the tropical rain forest. While issues such as logging, eco-timber, eco-tourism have been widely analyzed from an outsider’s perspective, this book considers them from the local people’s viewpoint, in terms of a long history of the rainforest uses. The authors demonstrate that the relationship of indigenous people to the tropical forest is not essentially timeless, nor is it primarily spiritual or mystical. It is in fact firmly connected to modern realities, while still being rooted in historical beliefs and practices. Standing at the intersection of anthropology, historical geography and rainforest ecology, and also at the interface of the local and the global, this ethnographically grounded study dispels a number of commonly held assumptions. It reveals how processes of ’impact’ are actually two-way interactions, as local communities in Melanesia incorporate industries like logging into rapidly evolving post-colonial society and economy.